We Must Have Missed a Decimal Point

So you thought it was a lot when TARP cost us $700 billion, right? Bloomberg News has pried information out the Fed via Freedom of Information Act requests, revealing that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke actually pumped as much as $7.77 trillion into the banking system. When these guys say they're going to prevent another Lehman on their watch "at any cost," they're not kidding: that's more than half the gross national product.

J.P. Morgan tapped the Fed's Term Auction Facility for more than half the bank's cash holdings. "The six biggest U.S. banks, which received $160 billion of TARP funds, borrowed as much as $460 billion from the Fed.

So, I'll run that same scheme with them. Why not loan the money to me, and I'll buy the T-bonds? By my math, that works out to increasing the net worth of every single American by around $27,000 -- call it a hundred grand for a family of four.

I think what it actually works out to is decreasing the net worth of every single American by around $27K and delivering it to the nation's largest banks. But I assume a few other people got to wet their beak in the process.